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If you stick with the tools which actually don't abstract the native platforms (e.g. RoboVM and Xamarin), I think you will learn native development quite easily. I've taken this approach, and I've had no trouble using documentation/StackOverflow to write equivalent code in Java/C#. Since pretty much all the APIs in these tools are 1-1 with the native APIs, I've also had no trouble going in the reverse direction and writing Swift/Objective-C/Java. You will still need to learn the languages, but you won't need to re-learn the APIs (which is the time consuming part).

Personally, I see little to no disadvantage with using these particular types of tools, especially if it means you can use languages like Scala, C#, and F# instead of Objective-C and Java.




I started serious app dev with Xamarin before I ever touched ObjC. After having implemented a ton of apps I am able to move between Xamarin/RoboVM/ObjC/Swift/Java quite easily. I dabbled with Cordova and Titanium before that a bit but that was not a good experience for me.




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